Leader of modern museum conservation practices; historian of Italian art.
Brandi graduated
in with a law degree from the University of Siena in 1927, but his interests had
moved to art so much that he wrote a thesis the following year at the
University of Florence on the artists Rutilio Manetti, Francesco Vanni, and
Ventura Salimbeni. In 1930 he was assigned to the Administration of
Antiquities and the Fine Arts to assist the Inspector (Soprintendenza) of
Monuments and Galleries of Siena. There he cataloged and reinstalled the collection of the paintings of the
Academy of Fine Arts of Siena in its new home in Buonsignori palace. This
resulted in Brandi's important 1933 exhibition, "La Regia pinacoteca di Siena."
The exhibition was a major achievement, documenting the swelling interested in
the so-called "Sienese primitives" in a well-researched and impartial catalog.
The same year he was appointed Inspector to Monuments of Bologna. During his
tenure, the city created its first laboratory for art works restoration, again
resulting in an important exhibition, "Mostra della pittura riminese del
trecento" (Exhibition of Painting from Rimini from the 1300's) of 1935. He
moved to Rome in 1936 to become the Director of Antiquity and Fine Arts.
In 1938 the Italian Minister of Fine Arts, Giulio Argan (q.v.), endowed a
government institute for restoration, the Istituto Centrale del Restauro (ICR), appointing Brandi, a friend, as its first
director. There Brandi developed his theories on the careful restoration and
conservation of monuments. The approaching war limited the Institute's
activities and it closed in 1945, but reopened shortly thereafter. As
director of a major conservation center, Brandi intervened extensively in
controversies of restoration. He published numerous articles on modern
approaches in conservation, some in English, which were collected in his 1963 Teoria del restauro.
Two publications on Duccio one of ca. 1949 and a monograph of 1951 remain his
best writing. He retired from the Istituto in 1959.

Brandi's methods of conservation allowed him to make chronological assessments
based more than on simple art-historical opinion. His date of a pivotal panel of
painting in the church of Santa Maria in Trastevere as sixth century was
questioned by Carol Bertelli (q.v.). Brandi's date, however, has subsequently
been accepted as
correct. John Pope-Hennessey (q.v.) praised Brandi's 1933 Siena painting
catalog as, "the first fully efficient catalogue of a public collection of
Italian painting."